One of the hardest things to do it to hide what you mean to say and only say enough for the reader to guess what you meant, and to connect the dots. We tend to over-explain in the fear that the readers won't get us.
Wrong.
Readers are smart. They read to tickle their intellect, and they delight in uncovering the secrets you plant.
So write out what you want to say, then think about how to hide it and rewrite it.
Read MoreI had this epiphany strike me while reading Anna Karenina. There is a scene of conflict between Anna and Vronsky (several of them) where the dialogue is almost meaningless if you looked at it as pure dialogue. It has no information in it, no explanations; the lines are broken, unfinished. It was while reading those scenes that I undestood something I already knew yet failed to apply fully to my own writing.
You know how they say, you're blind to something until you're ready to see it? Yeah, like that.
Read MoreI'm reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky right now, and it's taking me a sweet sweet time. Because. I'm trying something new. Don't ask me where I picked up this idea, I actually don't remember. I started doing it at the end of writing the 2nd draft of IRKADURA (and today is the day I'm starting to write the 3rd draft! Ahhh!! AHHH!!! I'm so fucking scared!!!). Here is what it looks like (and it actually legitimately helped me write better dialogue, I swear, has been confirmed by a NY Times Bestselling author). Are you ready? When I read, at every line of dialogue, I pause and get inside that character's head, THEN I read the line. Like, literally, remember the movie Being John Malkovich? Yeah, like that. Or, think of it this way. Think like a movie director. Imagine the shots. So, switch between camera angles. Rotate the whole scene in your head in 3D. That's what it looks like to me. I become that character, for that one particular line of dialogue she or he (or IT?) says. Then, when the other character answers, I switch again. I get out of the first character's head and get inside the second character's head. It's hard. It takes me time to pause and force myself to do it, and to switch the scene view in my mind. I also do something else. If there are more characters, I pause and hop inside their heads too, just to see what they see, even if they don't do anything. It takes forever! But it's worth the effort! Here is why.
Read MoreAmazing how in the years of writing my blog, I've never touched on this subject. How did it get skipped? Perhaps because it's spoken about everywhere all the time, so it became one of those obvious things everyone heard about and is therefore sick of. I dunno. Let me try a crack at it and see what you think. Of course it's all about showing and not telling, as we have been told by teachers, writing peers, and all the other smart folk who have written awesome shit and are willing to give out advice. Well, I've written shit too, but not much yet, only on my 3rd novel. I can tell you that it's not so much about show vs tell as it is about you vs your characters. WHAT THE FUCK? You say. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO SAY THAT? I know, just a newbie writer, but bear with me. Let me explain. Okay, here goes.
It's not you who is writing the book, it's your characters. This was hard to realize, because it meant I had to rewrite whole passages in my my current draft. What is it, you wonder? It's life philosophies, the outlooks, the goals, the whatever you want to call it (various sources will call it various things), but basically, it's what your characters want from life, at least from life you carved out for them in your book. It can be as primitive as getting drunk, still, it's a valid goal, and with it comes a certain belief in certain things. Like, for example, in IRKADURA I'm describing one old drunk, a chauvinistic communist to the bone (I've met people like that) and a people hater, he especially hates those who are not Russian. He curses like the lowest motherfucker and calls Jewish people stinking Jews and thieves and other colorful words, claiming that Stalin would've killed them off in no time. On top of it, he is in the hospital where behaves atrociously toward staff, like an old bitter moron. See, this guy has a certain life philosophy, it's not mine, it's his, I've met people like him, they are real, and I wanted to show it. In the past I was afraid to write things like these, thinking I would offend people, until I realized this bit about the characters writing the book and not me. I thought I needed to state things in my books that I believe in as an author, but I was wrong. My goal is to distance myself from the book as far as possible and show my characters' beliefs, to create a story out of it. My own beliefs will be the underlying fabric of the overall theme, but not of the immediate actions, and reactions, and dialogue bits, and all that story stuff. That was scary. Like, I grew up skin color blind, if a term like this exists. Not sure how I managed it, because many people around me hated foreigners for various reasons. I adored them, with a certain wonder. I don't give a fuck if someone's skin is blue, or green, or whatever color. It was always foreign to me, this hate, so I injected that into Irka, the main character from IRKADURA. She's in the hospital, listening to that old moronic idiot yakking her ears off about his hate of this and his hate of that. In this context, I'm SHOWING the story through the actions and dialogue of the characters, not TELLING, see? What I did before, I TOLD, describing how in Russia many people would be openly chauvinistic, and why, and where it originated. I cut it all out and replaced it with short episodes like the one described above.
Write in this fashion: noun, verb, noun, verb, and that is all you do. So. I'm the guilty one here of taking this SHOW VS TELL stuff and applying it to SIREN SUICIDES literally. Like, I described everything in such detail, that to some extent it bogged down the story. I thought I needed to "show". Yeah, right, I didn't fully understand what it meant. But what it really means is this, you move the story forward, that's all you do. I repeat, that is all you do. Got it? Let me repeat it one more time, to drive the idea home. The only thing you do is you move the story forward. And you do it very simply, as in, noun, verb, noun, verb. Forget about adjectives, forget about descriptions, forget about everything. TELL THE FUCKING STORY. Here. A bum woke up in a puddle of cold piss. He sat up, looked at the empty bottle of vodka. "Fuckin' waste..." He kicked it and spat, lifting himself up, sliding on wet concrete and sprawling face first with a howl. The door below slammed. There were footsteps. I can keep going here, but I simply wanted to illustrate the primitive structure of he did this, she did this, which you apply through both action and dialogue. Well, I used the word empty to describe the bottle because it was imperative to the story, and cold and wet, but that's it. Maybe I could even leave out cold and wet. Now, let me ask you this, did you imagine this bum? I bet you did. BUT I DIDN'T SAY SHIT ABOUT HIS APPEARANCE. See, now you know that if you need to throw something in, like, he was missing an eye, because it's important for the story, do it, it will stand out that much more if nothing else surrounds it. Action, baby, action, tell me what's happening, and I'm yours.
Write it like you're watching a movie in your head. Write your story in a way you would describe a movie if it was made from your book. For example, you can write that your character was afraid. But if you let me see his shifting eyes, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, his trembling hands, his shaky voice, make him say, "Let's get outta here boys", then I will conclude myself that he is scared shitless. Better, I will feel what he feels without even resorting to the word afraid in my head, bypassing it altogether. This is the kind of connection you want with your reader, on the raw emotional level, the more emotional, the better. If you make me cry, make me laugh, make me sick or gross me out, make me feel smarter than you, I will read your books forever, you will get my guts and my soul and my heart. But if you tell me how to feel, I will tell you, fuck you, who do you think you are to tell me how to feel, I want to decide myself, and I will throw your book at the wall in frustration. Well, maybe not, maybe in my head I will do it, because I'm a really really nice devochka, but in reality I will put it aside and stop reading it, or, no, I will finish reading it, because I finish reading every book I start, but I will steer clear of your books in the future. You don't want that, right? Well, don't cheat me. Let me make my own conclusions by showing me a slice of your life, of what you had to go through, and I will be yours forever as a reader.
Those are probably the biggest things I can say about showing versus telling, and of course showing is what we all love, telling is typically reserved for those dry essays we had to write in high school, describing author's intentions and whatnot. It's a great skill to have, but it's not applicable in story writing, unless your character has to write a dry essay, see, then it's a different thing, so you can still get away with it. Above all, and I know I said it many times, the solution to feeling this in your own gut, this whole show versus tell thing, is to write a lot and read a lot. Like a pattern of a wondrous prehistoric butterfly that has been engraved by accident in stone, it will emerge for you, foggy at first, then clearer and clearer. I know I'm still brushing off said butterfly's tail and I see no fucking patterns so I feel frustrated, but I know I must keep digging, and so I will, and so I suggest you do. Let's do this together, love, and write awesome books. xoxo
Photo by Lara Zankoul
Photo by Lara Zankoul
I have blogged before on balancing pairs of these wonderful things, like descriptions versus commentary and transitions from dialogue to descriptions and back. I even blogged about the danger of long descriptions, but I haven't yet written on the subject of all three, or however many elements there are. And now that I think about it, there really are only three things. People talk shit - dialogue. People look like shit (or not like shit, if you're writing romance) - descriptions. People do shit - action. There are other fancy names for fancy things like exposition (still don't really understand what that means), backstory, flashbacks, theme, bla-bla-bla (I've been actually Googling these terms to refresh my memory). I don't think about any of that when I write, I just write the story. And so far 3 elements have been plenty. Like Kurt Vonnegut said, "Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action." You can look at it in many different ways, it's still the same. This happened. This dude said this. This gal said this. This happened. That happened. Oh, and it happened in this town looking like this, and they looked like this. You get the drill. So, for the sake of this blog post, we shall cover three things.
Dialogue is never perfect. There are books with excessive dialogue, and there are books with almost no dialogue at all. What exactly does this mean and how should you take it on, especially if you're a beginning writer like me? You don't. Don't copy anyone, just because they're a famous writer, or your favorite writer, be yourself. If you talk a lot, write a lot of dialogue. If you don't talk a lot, don't write a lot of dialogue. Write what naturally comes to you. But once you do start writing, in case of dialogue specifically, break it up. As in, when people talk, they start talking from the middle of the thought, and they get interrupted a lot. Remember the movie Up, "Squirrel!" Yeah, like that. Also, people interrupt people. People leave half of a sentence hanging, without finishing it. It's all very fluid and not perfect. When writing, it's easy to slide into this perfection of writing dialogue in complete sentences. Hey, that's what teachers taught us in school, write complete sentences, with fucking structure and whatnot! Well, they were wrong. Throw it out the window and forget about structure. When people talk, they have no structure, they have feelings, emotions. They try to structure them, yes, but they always fail horribly. And we read for those nuggets of failure, trying to guess what this or that characters feels inside. That's the fun of reading. Now, I will get at the bottom of this post on how to balance all three things, dialogue, descriptions, and action, so don't despair.
Descriptions only begin on the page, but end in a reader's mind. Yeah, right, I wish I was the one who said it. I didn't, I only paraphrased it. Stephen King was the one who said it, here is the quote: " Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” With this in mind, all you have to do is paint one or two sentences and get on the way with telling the story. I had to learn it the hard way, over-describing practically everything in SIREN SUICIDES. I did learn my lesson, and I moved on. I'm very sparse with descriptions in ROSEHEAD now, only giving enough to paint the picture, and embellishing only the important elements. And here is where the balance comes from. You have to describe things for the reader to see the story, to orient herself or himself, but that's all you gotta do. Now, because your story is about something very important, those important parts you can embellish more than usual, to draw reader's attention to them. Also, one more thing I do. Somebody said it, can't remember who, but it goes like this. Everything that the reader already saw, describe briefly. For example, "It was a hot summer afternoon." We all know what a hot summer afternoon looks like, we all have our own idea about it, but it's basically the same. So say that one sentence and move on to the action or the dialogue. But if you're describing a new alien weapon that the reader has never seen before, indulge in description, make it real. I primarily use allegories to not get carried away, like "his gun looked like two cucumbers glued together by intergalactic saliva" or some shit like that. In general, don't do more than 3 sentences, otherwise it can get boring pretty fast.
Action is where the story happens. This is the most important element of any story. Basically, you have to answer the reader's question: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENS? She ran to the Moon. He caught her with a fish hook. They fell into the bog of misery. Twenty tentacles of a mutant giant cockroach sucked them into another dimension. A kangaroo shrieked, because a herd of flying giraffes opened fire on... well, I'm getting carried away here. But this is it, really. Noun, verb. Verb, noun. Use adjectives sporadically, refrain from using adverbs, and do not use exclamations marks!!!!! Yeah, I'm so guilty of that. Anyway. Action should really dominate your pages, with a few lines of description here and there, and occasional blocks or lines of dialogue. But, again, remember, this is all up to you, up to what kind of storyteller you are. There is no golden rule for everybody. Everybody is different. You might be able to tell your story through dialogue, by writing something like this: "Get that green thing away from me!" "Trying! That fucking kangaroo got my gun!" "Watch out! I think that's a--" "--it's a bomb!" BAM! "Is that you? Are you breathing?" "No, you are mistaken, maiden. I am a panda overlord, ruling the entire universe." Demonic laughter. Okay, this is totally off the wall and very bad, but I just wanted to throw something out there to show how you can do action through dialogue. You can also do dialogue through action, as in: "They talked about the weather. She mentioned that fact that it wasn't sunny today, studying her nails. He said that it looks like it's going to rain, his hand accidentally brushing hers. They both looked up at the sky at the same time, wondering exactly when it's going to rain. He breathed into her ear that it might start raining any minute, and they better..." All right, I'll stop right here, before I get too carried away.
Balance your writing they way it feels natural. This is the closing thingy, about all three things, dialogue, descriptions, and action. And whatever else it is you want to balance. The basic thing is, trust your gut. If your gut gleefully enjoys you writing page after page of dialogue, excellent. Keep writing it. If your gut cringes at the thought of writing dialogue, don't. In fact, read Nabokov's LOLITA. Do you see any dialogue there? Yeah, very very little. You can think of the three things this way. There is dialogue, and there is description, but they are both like these transparent layers over action, which is really the meat of the story. As much as you can, try for every sentence to move your story forward. Even if you're describing something, try to make it so that it moves the story forward. Remember, you have to make the reader turn the page. Every page the reader has to be glued to your story. Because at any moment the reader can be interrupted by life, and if your reader happens to be interrupted on the page of a long long description, guess what will happen? The reader might not get back to your story, abandoning your book. The only way to not let that happen is to keep the action moving the story forward. This is how books end up on the best-seller lists. People can't stop reading them (says she who hasn't made it to any best-selling lists, so feel free to scoff at me, I'm still learning!).
There. I think this should do. Let's try something new here. How about you tell me in the comments what you want me to blog about next? I was thinking about the topic of beginning and ending chapters. Yes? No? Any other ideas? Let me know. Happy writing!
